Wilkie Collins is mainly remembered for his best-selling sensation novel The Woman in White and his detective mystery The Moonstone, both published in the 1860s. However, in a literary career spanning almost forty years he wrote many other works, and Lyn Pykett looks at Collins's long and varied career in relation to the changing circumstances... more...

The fin de siècle, the period 1880-1914, long associated with decadence and with the literary movements of aestheticism and symbolism, has received renewed critical interest recently. The essays in this volume form a valuable introduction to fin de siècle cultural studies and provide a commentary on important aspects of current critical debate and... more...

The women's sensation novel of the 1860s and the New Woman fiction of the 1890s were two major examples of a perceived feminine invasion of fiction which caused a critical furore in their day. Both genres, with their shocking, `fast' heroines, fired the popular imagination by putting female sexuality on the literary agenda and undermining the `proper... more...

Emily Bront_'s writings explore, expand, and transgress limited nineteenth-century ideas of the nature of the female lot and of women's creativity. This study offers an extensive rereading of the poems which focuses on Emily Bront_'s problematic relationship to the Romantic tradition in which they were produced, and to the critical tradition in which... more...

it only rests with yourself to become Lady Audley, and the mistress of Audley Court'When beautiful young Lucy Graham accepts the hand of Sir Michael Audley, her fortune and her future look secure. But Lady Audley's past is shrouded in mystery, and to Sir Michael's nephew Robert, she is not all that she seems. When his good friend George... more...